Click on the Play Button below to hear a reading of the poem:
A Conceptual Bestiary
An Adventure in Rhyme, Rhythm, and Reason
A felicity of thought is feline, and when it occurs,
resonates within with cognitive zest and lingering purrs,
that reverberate a catlike curious mood
where thoughts constellate in certitude.
Some thoughts are massive, like a Brahma bull,
a presence robust, brawny, muscular, frothy and full,
which, when they come bellowing to the fore,
require the grace and guile of a matador.
Thoughts with beauty are oscine, like a singing bird,
or a skylark soaring high up in azure on the wing,
where meaning is grasped and imprecisely heard
or seen concisely in the pulchritude of a golden ring.
This is the realm not of the abstractly logical
But the spacious, the capacious, ornithological.
Thoughts too dark and deep for words are like Pisces,
who dapple up from depths to breach the high seas—
flash! and the fins splash! and rainbow foam
roams rippling rare in the lusty sunlit air,
giving a glimpse of what we could barely fathom,
salubrious as salmon, coral, and wild sargassum.
If you don’t laugh when you see a giraffe
Take a moment to atone, then check your funny bone.
I, for one, when I hold hazy my gaze
see little more than a crazy comic maze.
Your courtly little crown has me smiling upside down
and your marbled motley skin evinces a sportly grin.
When you go racing across plains in a long-leggéd run
I long to be one, in unison, with your quadripedal fun.
In your lashy eyes anyone with 20-20 can see
that they are—no surprise—luminous with glee.
A long neck holds your head up with such aplomb
and, within, wind pipes bred for intoning . . . Om!
It is surely an evolutionary gaffe
that even the calf of a tall giraffe
must so bend down water to quaff
that, like jolly Sir John Falstaff,
we can only look on and scoff or laugh.
In thought, if there be time enough for gravity,
let there be ample times and rhymes for levity,
time for the giraffe’s angularity and high hilarity,
and know that the giraffe as many and as one
is a glorious, uproarious, and victorious Pun.
If creatures arise from an imagination unbounded
where all possibilities are given tries and sounded,
entertain within, and into, a bestiary every moment new,
animated with craythurs, even taboo, as in a politic zoo,
where mind may rejoice in realms that open rarely
and thoughts may vary, be merry, and so very airy,
that Nature, I pray thee, be your book and breviary.